The Z06 goes Under the Wrench

2013-05-10T05:00:01Z

At the very core, I am an "upgrader." Whether it be computers, cars, smartphones, etc. I always seem to be looking for ways to make my possessions just a little bit better. Almost a decade ago my good friend, Pat introduced me to upgrading cars.

At the time, Pat had been driving an Eagle Talon, also known as the Mitsubishi Eclipse and Plymouth Laser (read more about Diamond Star Motors). Pat moved down to the Dallas area and immediately went car shopping for a "new" DSM to have down here, rather than ship his car all the way down from Pennsylvania. For those of you not familiar with DSMs, they had a turbo-charged 2.0-liter engine and an all-wheel drive transmission. The real beauty of the car was that with a few hundred dollars a considerable amount of power could be added right off the bat. A skilled driver with those modifications would turn heads when launching their cars from a stop.

Pat inspired me and I bought a 1992 Eclipse GSX of my own and began making a laundry list of upgrades to it. I got in way over my head. All the tinkering turned that car into something that wound up not being very much fun to drive on a daily basis and it wound up eating up so much of my money that I learned a valuable lesson and wound up ridding myself of that car and buying something a bit more practical again.

Predictably I replaced practical with something fun and bought a 2004 Mazda RX-8 and drove that for a few years. The car was neat, featuring a magical rotary engine, and it handled really well. Unfortunately, in the "oomph" category, it was sorely lacking. I was disappointed that the car didn't have the get-up-and-go that my Eclipse had when it was stock. To make matters worse, I was disappointed in the upgrades that were available to the RX-8. They were expensive and didn't result in enough performance gain to justify the cost. Ultimately, I was hindered by two factors; the RX-8 just wasn't very upgrade ready, and auto manufacturers are getting much better at getting more out of their platforms.

In my most recent quest for the ideal car I kicked around a bunch of different models like the Mitsubishi Evolution, Subaru WRX and even gave some pretty serious consideration to muscle cars like the Mustang and Camaro. Ultimately, I chose a car that I had enjoyed since my boyhood, the Chevrolet Corvette. While doing my shopping for Corvettes that I could actually afford, the voice of the upgrader in me began sowing seeds in my head, which got me wondering what kinds of bigger exhausts, cams, superchargers, etc. I could wind up putting on the car after I purchased it. That got me thinking about the Z06 a car that I'd always admired, in my opinion a borderline supercar. I was surprised to find out that the Z06s were not that much more expensive than the Corvettes I had been looking for. The added performance, the rarity of the car and the fact it was a hardtop coupe instead of a hatchback or a convertible sealed the deal for me.

Immediately after buying the car, I started reading forums and looking at various upgrades that could be done on my new car. Much to my chagrin I learned that one of the premier Corvette performance shops, LG Motorsports, was practically in my own backyard. However, my initial impression of the Z06 was that it didn't really need all that much tinkering. It was more powerful and handled better than both my Eclipse and RX-8.

Despite the Z06 not really needing any upgrades to enhance its pedigree, the tinkerer in me could not resist, and I began eyeballing a few different modifications that I could make to turn a few more heads and take some time off of my timeslips the next time I went out to the drag strip. My wonderful wife, Julia, must have noticed that I was perusing and shopping, because this year she said for my birthday I should pick out some parts to have put on the Z06.

The Plan

So, my plan was to throw a few parts on the car to make it more enjoyable without having to back a dump truck full of money in order to get it taken care of and to keep the car relatively quiet and enjoyable to drive, since my commute has recently grown to just about 2-hours round trip. I also didn't want to spend money upgrading things that Chevrolet had already done for the Z06. These three restrictions eliminated forced induction and work to the top half of the motor.... At least for now.

Ultimately, I decided that my first modifications would be: a cooler thermostat, an intake, some exhaust work, a short shifter and a custom tune by the local Corvette experts, LG Motorsports:

Hypertech 160 Degree Thermostat: A cooler thermostat keeps the engine running a bit cooler, which gives the tuner (or the car's computer) the ability to advance the engine's timing a bit resulting in some more power.
LG Short Shifter: I'm not sure what shifting an 18-wheeler might feel like, but the stock shifter felt a bit like I've imagined shifting a big rig would be like. The short shifter doesn't really add any power, but because it allows you to make quicker shifts, you spend less time with the clutch engaged which isn't insignificant.
VaraRam VR-BR2: I especially liked the VR-BR2 because of how it uses the ducting into the nose of the Corvette to collect and force air into the intake.
LG Super Pro Headers w/ High Flow Catalytic Converters: There are two advantages of an improved exhaust system. One of them is eliminating some of the restrictions associated with the stock exhaust (especially the catalytic converters), boosting performance in the process. Secondarily, the exhaust note has a much more noticeable and aggressive tone.

In the process of upgrading and tuning the car we also discovered that my car's water pump appeared to be on the way out, as it was having a hard time cooling the car down at low RPMs. As a precaution, I decided to go ahead and replace it now rather than wait for it to give up the ghost.

The Results

I called down to the shop late Tuesday evening towards the end of their day, and LG Motorsports informed me that the car was about go up on the dyno to get dialed in with its new parts. Because they're just a few miles from the house, I had my wife drop me off so that I could lurk and take some really bad cell-phone video of a couple of the sessions up on the dyno. I apologize in advance for the really poor camerawork.

Pass 2

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Pass 3

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Ultimately, here's the verdict that the dyno rendered for my new parts and custom tune. The first video is the green line on the dyno chart, and the second video is the red line on the dyno chart. Unfortunately, I didn't get a video of the first baseline pull (blue on the chart):

Conclusion

Between the baseline and tuned pull, I saw a max horsepower increase of twenty-one. I spelled that out instead of using numbers, because I wanted to make that twenty-one look as big and impressive as I possibly could. I'd be lying if said I wasn't a little disappointed in the numeric, measurable result of the upgrades. Secretly, I was hoping for something about double what I got. My hope was that the wheel horsepower would meet or exceed the 405HP badge that's on every C5 Z06. By choosing to upgrade intake and exhaust, my hope is that it will help my next modifications be more potent.

Measurable statistics are helpful, but many times they're not complete. In this case, the differences between the car after the upgrades are quite noticeable when using my totally unscientific "butt-dyno." I can definitely feel the additional power under sudden acceleration. The short-throw shifter really changes the dynamic of driving it's a bit tougher to move now, but the shifts happen more quickly. Lastly the car feels and sounds more aggressive and angrier now. Most importantly, you should have seen the grin on my face when the tuner was making those pulls. At one point, I had to stop smiling because my cheeks were getting fatigued. That's the same smile I'm going to get to experience every time that I press down hard on the gas pedal.

P.S. Thanks for the wonderful birthday gift, Julia. I'm very spoiled :)

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April Test-and-Tune @ North Star Dragway

2013-04-15T01:45:47Z

In owning three different sports cars, I've been to the drag races quite a few times and I've actually gone out and made some of my own very amateurish passes of my own on a couple of occasions. The most recent time I did it was back in November of 2012 which was also the first time I went racing in my new (to me) 2002 Chevrolet Corvette Z06.

A few friends and I returned to North Star Dragway for one of their Test and Tune events, which essentially is an open track event for anyone willing to pay and make passes. I suspect the intent is to allow some of the more serious hobbyists and racers the chance to make a few passes in their real racecars, but they also let guys like me bring out their street cars and have some fun. It was fun seeing a bunch of different kinds of cars out there and it was really interesting to see something like this in my side view mirror several times throughout the afternoon.

The last time we were out there, there were an odd number of us racing, so I wound up being the odd man out and racing against random strangers. However, this time there were only two of us driving myself and my friend, Duncan in his 2010 Ford Taurus SHO, aka the SHOboat, which surprisingly ticks off a couple things that I've loved having in a car in the past; all-wheel drive and forced induction. It's unfortunate that the thing is so damn heavy with a curb weight of 4,388, pounds and considerably heavier with Duncan in the driver's seat.

I was pretty eager to make a few passes of my own and to see if I had learned from my mistakes in the past. Namely, those mistakes were leaving the traction control on, shifting too late and launching poorly. I wish that I could say I didn't repeat any of those mistakes, but unfortunately I cannot. At the very least, I think I can say that I managed to cut down the mistakes on each subsequent pass.

This is the part of the blog where I point out that my car is over a decade old, the tires are probably hardened from the years, and that there's a plethora of reasons that my car wouldn't perform like it did in 2002 when Car and Driver reviewed it. But while those reasons might have held the Z06 back a bit, I suspect that we all know the real reason the car went slow; it was me!

Pass One

The most memorable part of this pass is my distinct recollection of seeing the light turn green on the tree and thinking "Oh hey, I should go now" and then immediately starting to worry that my reaction time was going to be measured in sections rather than fractions of seconds. Reaction time had been a big problem the first time out there and based off this pass, I was worried it'd be a problem this time too. When I compared the time slips from November to these time slips, I was pretty surprised. My reaction time was bad, but not nearly as bad as it had been the first few passes in November. And to make matters worse, I forgot to turn off the traction control. Some lessons are just harder to learn than others, I suppose.

    Reaction....0.7934
    60 FT.......2.1590
    330 FT......5.7596
    1/8 ET......8.7961
    1/8 MPH......81.39

Pass Two

I made marked improvement in my reaction time and I trapped at a higher speed than the first pass, but for some reason my 60-foot time was considerably slower, all indicative of yet another less than stellar launch, but I made up for it a bit, turning in a slightly faster time than the first pass. Incremental or not, progress is still progress!

    Reaction....0.6575
    60 FT.......2.1865
    330 FT......5.8413
    1/8 ET......8.7677
    1/8 MPH......85.45

Pass Three

Thankfully, our friend Darrell showed up to mock us instead of racing his own Mustang. Apparently he was concerned with the plumes of smoke flowing from his exhaust under acceleration. I was surprised; I thought that this was just something that came stock on Mustangs. Darrell got his revenge by recording what I felt was my worst pass ever and posting it on YouTube. I think everybody's favorite part is when the guy in the foreground chuckles at us and walks away, completely disinterested in our race.

    Reaction....0.5742
    60 FT.......2.2439
    330 FT......5.9081
    1/8 ET......8.8197
    1/8 MPH......85.88

Pass Four

I had brought my own camera, but my usual camera people weren't available to go out to the races with me. Thankfully, Duke's fiancee, Audrey, was kind enough to take a video of my final run. This time, I was determined to launch well, leave the traction control off, shift well and have my best pass ever. I hadn't even beat Duncan yet that day in any of my prior attempts, so I was really setting my sights pretty high. Wouldn't you know, I actually managed to put in a somewhat decent run and not continue to be such an embarrassment to Z06 owners worldwide. This run felt much better just while I was driving it. The result showed up both on the time slip and got me out in front of Duncan. Darrell also shared a video of this pass on Youtube but I liked my camera's copy better.

    Reaction....0.3713
    60 FT.......2.1079
    330 FT......5.6941
    1/8 ET......8.6163
    1/8 MPH......85.41

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Timeslips

In the age of the Internet, things are ruled with the simple statement of "Pics or it didn't happen!" which is understandable, with as much racing people seem to do seated behind their monitors or smartphones. However, considering the very pedestrian nature of my time slips, I'd be astonished if someone seriously thought I was being dishonest, but just in case here they are:

Final Thoughts

I had a really fun time hanging out, watching honest-to-God fast cars barrel down the track and then making my own (often chuckle worthy) few passes. I'm much happier with the overall results from this time compared to last November. Hopefully next time we make it to the drag strip, I will make some additional gains and get to write about them!

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Wireless Charging for the Galaxy S3

2013-04-05T05:00:00Z

I bought my wife a Google Nexus 4 for Christmas and then for our anniversary, I purchased her the wireless charging accessory that is available for it. I was almost instantly green with envy. As a pretty avid user of my smart phone, I very rarely make it through a day without needing to charge.

I wondered how difficult and expensive it would be to add wireless charging to the Samsung Galaxy S3. I had read rumors that Samsung would be selling a wireless charging system, but the phone's been out quite a while now and nothing seems to have reached the market. Considering the fact that Samsung's marketing department is cranking up on the Galaxy S4, I'm dubious about whether something will come out for the Galaxy S3 from Samsung.

Unexpectedly, I stumbled across this thread on the XDA forums which detailed an "easy" way to take pieces from obsolete Palm phones to add wireless charging to the Galaxy S3 in five minutes. In reading the thread, there didn't seem to be anything that I felt I couldn't do, and in looking at prices on Amazon, the parts were going to add up to much less than what I paid for my wife's charging mat.

Over the years I've found that when someone says something is "cheap & easy" on the Internet to do yourself, somehow it manages to turn into expensive and frustrating when I take it on. But considering the fact that the parts cost so little, I couldn't help but give it a try.

Parts List:

I wound up deciding the magnets might be useful in getting the phone to align with the charger, so I went ahead and picked those up. But that's a completely optional item.

Tools Needed:

Scissors
Scotch Tape
Glue Gun
multimeter
Pocket knife
Something slender and somewhat pointy; like a small screwdriver

The long and short of the mod is that you remove the wireless charging guts from the PALM Pixi phone cover, flip it 180 degrees, position it correctly in the Galaxy S3 phone cover, and then use copper tape to connect the charging terminals in the phone to the wireless charging guts. Cheap and easy, right? Not necessarily so in my case. I followed the steps online pretty closely and found them to be adequate but left me wanting additional details, and ultimately either defective parts or my own inexperience caused me problems.

After getting everything put together and into the back cover of my Galaxy S3 I placed it on the charger and tried to read the voltage off the contraption. Sadly, the multimeter read 0.00. I futzed around for a good hour making sure the copper tape was taped down and there weren't any loose but never could get any positive readings off of the multimeter.

I began to become concerned about a few things. Firstly, I had read in the thread, that positioning of the coil was important and could cause issues if you didn't have the correct alignment between the coil and the charger. Secondly, I became concerned that I had defective or incorrect parts. And lastly, I was practically convinced that I had damaged the parts in the process of disassembling them somehow.

Assuming I had obliterated the electronics when disassembling and relocating the coil into my phone's cover, I decided that I would order an additional Pixi Cover. On top of that, because I wanted to be able to charge via the Touchstone in a couple different places, I went ahead and ordered an additional Touchstone too.

Originally I had planned to nicely set everything using hot glue, but in the process I took everything apart and put it back together again in a variety of different configurations. When I got everything put together and functioning well, I simply decided that the scotch tape I had used to tack everything in place was going to be sufficient.

Having had these difficulties in my first attempt, I thought I'd write a detailed step-by-step of how I accomplished the task for the people out there like me who are more proficient in destruction than they are in creation. The difference between my successful and unsuccessful attempts was the liberal use of my multimeter at almost every step of the way.

Test the AC Adapter and Micro USB cable by plugging them into an outlet and into your phone. Your phone should start charging. In your phone's settings, select Battery and make sure it says Charging (AC).
Hook the USB cable up into the PALM Touchstone and place the PALM Pixi cover on the Touchstone. The magnets in the Touchstone should align the case correctly. Using your multimeter, test the DC Voltage on the two contacts inside the cover it should read around 5.5v. If it doesn't right off the bat, then you probably just have it misaligned, so fiddle with it a bit to see if you can get the correct voltage read off the device. I noticed that my Touchstone whines very quietly when it's properly aligned. When it was misaligned, it would be quiet or intermittently emit that whine.
Carefully disassemble the PALM Pixi cover. Everything is glued or taped in there, so taking it apart is pretty simple. The most stubborn pieces are the four metal discs.
Take four of the Neodymium Magnets and place them on the PALM Touchstone like in this picture. Using the four metal discs and some scotch tape, set the four discs low in the back of the SGS3 cover. Make sure that their positioning and alignment roughly match what they did coming out of the Pixi cover. Test fit your SGS3 cover to the Touchstone and make sure the discs and magnets line up well.
Flip the coil assembly (Coil, circuit board, flexible circuit board thingamajig) upside down and on it's back. Then fold the flexible circuit board back on itself so that the positive and negative terminals are exposed. Center the coil in the four metal discs and then cover the bottom half of the coil with the t-shaped sticky tape that had been over it in the Pixi cover. Use the scotch tape to tack everything in place.

Note: This is an incredibly important step. I tried very hard to skip this step because this is where I was afraid I had damaged my first Pixi cover. However, it's not possible to use the tape and line up the terminals with the battery terminals inside the phone. That's why the author in the XDA forum thread said this was the clever part of the modification.
Put the SGS3 cover on the PALM Touchstone, which should be plugged in to the wall, and make sure you're getting a reading of around 5.5v on your multimeter.
Set your SGS3 cover on its back next to the phone and eyeball where you're going to need to use the copper tape and cut a few strips of the copper tape about 1in" x 1/8in". (actual lengths may vary)
Take two strips of the copper tape, and on one end of each strip, fold the end into a point. When doing this step, make sure you fold the shiny side over the sticky side to form your point because the shiny side is a better conductor than the sticky side.
On the phone's charging terminals to the left of the battery, put the pointy end down between the terminal and the phone case. Use something pointy, like a pen, small screwdriver, the leads of your multimeter, etc. to gently push the pointy end of the copper tap down to make contact with the charging terminal. Run the other end of the tape (in the opposite direction of the other charging terminal) toward the edge of the case to just behind the case clips. Trim off any excess tape.
Cut another 1/8" wide strip of copper tape. This tape will cover the top terminal on the flexible circuit board and then run to the matching edge of the case for the tape you ran from the top terminal in the phone. Place the back of your S3G3 on the Touchstone and measure the voltage, except this time measure from the terminal that has not been taped and the farthest point on your copper tape. If you're reading 5.5v, you're ready for the next step. If not, it probably requires a bit of re-taping. In the worst case, fold over the end of your copper tape and then tape that down on top of the terminal. The tape's sticky surface can interfere with the connection to the terminal.
Repeat step 10 for the other terminal on the flexible circuit board and test your cover on both lengths of the copper tape.
Put the cover back on your phone, eyeball the strips of copper tape on both sides and make sure they line up correctly and touch their counterparts. Also make sure that it's not getting shorted out on any other bits of copper tape. Carefully snap the case together.
Put the phone on the Touchstone. Depending on your phone's software you'll get a message pop up saying that you're wirelessly charging!

Note: Apparently, this message isn't present in many aftermarket phone ROMs. If you've flashed any ROMs, don't freak out like I did if you don't see the dialog pop up . In settings, check battery and see if it says you're Charging via AC.

As the original author indicates on XDA, here are a number of things that could cause problems. In the course of this modification I ran into every problem except the second one.

Positioning of the charging coil with respect to the Touchstone
Not using a PALM AC Adapter with the Touchstone
A lack of a good connection between the copper tape and the charging terminals in the phone.
A lack of a good connection between the terminals orfrom the charging coil electronics and the copper tape
You broke something, like I did

In the event you're worried about all the taking everything apart carefully and putting it back together, there appear to be options available for you. For around $20 on eBay someone is selling an assembled backplate for use with the PALM Touchstone. It'll probably wind up costing you a few bucks extra but you won't have to contend with doing these things yourself. Or, if you're willing, you can spend anywhere between $40-$60 to buy a Galaxy S3 Wireless Charging Kit from Amazon, which contains all the same parts already put together for you.

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This was incredibly easy to do, but it was also a little frustrating. I'm sad to say but humble enough to admit that the work isn't necessarily in my wheelhouse. The parts are a little persnickety and it requires care and attention on your part in order to put it together correctly. According to the original author, it is a "super easy" five minute modification, which, if you're familiar and confident, I imagine is entirely possible. However, in my case it took me a couple hours to get it working. I did take a little longer since I was working on writing this blog article and I also wasted a bunch of time unsuccessfully trying to improve upon the original author's method. In the end, it was an interesting project and I'm pretty excited that I can just plop my phone down on the Touchstone and have it start charging.

My final thought is that this is a very good modification indeed. Other than an ever-so-slight bulge on the back of the phone, it's hardly noticeable at all. It's incredibly inexpensive; I wound up spending roughly $20-25 to add wireless charging to my Galaxy S3. When you consider the prices of the various different wireless charging items out there today, I think that's a fantastic deal. If you ever go to sell and trade in your phone, you can easily remove the parts that you added and nobody would ever notice. The only negative thing I can conjure is that it's dependent on obsolete parts from the PALM Pixi (or Pre) phones. That's probably what makes it inexpensive right now; vendors are trying to clear their inventory, and as that happens the parts will likely vanish. Hopefully, by then you'll have upgraded your phone to something newer with built-in wireless charging.

Lastly, a huge kudos and thank you to android94301 of the XDA Forums and all the people who chipped in thoughts in that thread. People like me rely and appreciate the heck out of people like you who figure these things out in the first place and share them with the rest of us!

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Garage Makeover: Bringing Down the Popcorn Ceiling

2013-03-22T05:00:00Z

In an earlier article, I described my garage makeover project, phase one of which would be to remove the popcorn ceiling texture that was peeling from my garage. I even got started while writing my first article and posted a few photos of the progress that I had made.

I had helped my parents take on a similar project in their home; they wound up scraping the popcorn ceiling down in their bedroom and retexturing the ceiling. It was because of this that I was emboldened into taking on my own ceiling texture as part of my garage project.

Before getting started, I spent an entire Sunday afternoon at Lowe's, Harbor Freight and Home Depot looking for a clever tool to use to scrape down the popcorn. Ultimately, I settled on a Ceiling Texture Scraper built specifically for the task and appropriately marked up by thousands of percentages compared to its quality or value. I knew they existed, since my Dad and I had used something similar for their project. You could clip a plastic bag to it which catches a portion of what you scraped, which is also handy indoors. But since I was working in the garage, I didn't care too much about stuff falling and hitting the ground. This maybe was one of my bigger regrets, but more on that later!

I had some advice from numerous different places that I should wet the popcorn with a variety of different concoctions, but after my first couple swipes of the tool, I knew exactly what lay ahead of me. I suspect that the semi-outdoorsy properties of the garage exposed it to enough temperature and moisture to cause the areas that had blistered and started peeling to come loose. I had hoped that the majority of the garage would be pretty simple to scrape down. Thankfully, I was correct. A couple nice swipes and that popcorn texture was coming right off. The texture came down without any real effort anywhere it was applied to bare drywall.

Everywhere else was considerably less easy. Between every seam of the drywall, the popcorn texture was firmly and permanently affixed. The scraper tool was helpful but it wasn't very effective. On top of that, it looks like the ceiling has been patched in a couple places and there's been some sort of faux-popcorn texture (like this stuff in a spray can.) I decided that I would take a different approach with these areas.

To break up the monotony of work, I would sweep up the fallen texture. You never realize how fine some of the scraping is and how much of that stuff just stays up in the air floating around. Whenever I took "broom breaks," they seemed to go on forever. I was constantly sweeping and the stuff was constantly falling. I didn't spend an inordinate amount of time sweeping, but I definitely would have saved around an hour of work if the tool's garbage bag feature had caught half of it. But even if it had caught that much, there would still be plenty of sweeping and cleaning up to do.

For all of the seams around sheets of drywall, I decided that I'd need to get up on a ladder with something like a 6" Taping Knife and scrape the rest by hand. This wasn't an insanely difficult task, but there's a considerable amount of square footage in that drywall tape, and mud is spread across every seam. This literally took me hours and hours to get done; this is one of those cases where the first 90% of progress only represented about 10% of the time. That last 10% easily represented the lion's share of the work.

There were a couple other difficulties too. For some reason when they sprayed the garage they sprayed the wall above the garage with ceiling texture and they managed to spray the metal garage door brackets as well. I did the bits of wall above the garage door by hand and then decided a cheap wire brush attachment for my drill would be sufficient for getting it off the metal brackets. Fortunately for me the drill and wire brush worked fantastically; unfortunately for me I wound up nicking the drywall on the ceiling in a number of places trying to get it all off. I'll have to go back and fix those up with some joint compound or something similar and sand it down smooth.

I also tried to scrape down some of that "patch" work I described above and that didn't go so well. It's consistency was much harder than the ceiling texture and it doesn't want to come down at all. I really jackhammered on some of it and I managed to do some damage to the patch, I think. On these bits, I may actually have to do some practice on patching myself and cut out these damaged sections to "re-drywall" and tape them. I'm a little disappointed that I have to do that, but I'm looking forward to being able to practice somewhere since I've never had to do that before.

The end result of this phase of the project was as follows:

A very sore Brian
What seemed like endless iterations of sweeping the floor
A thin white film of fine powdery dust everywhere in the garage, in the house, and lots of white footprints (or paw prints) on the carpet.
A relatively bare ceiling with only a few imperfections to worry about.

I'd definitely love to get rid of the popcorn texture throughout the house, but if we decide to go that route I think that's probably justification to hire a professional. The garage is just big enough for me to understand what it would take to do all 2000-something square feet of our little house. I can't even begin to imagine the mess that would make and how much work it would take. It is possible that someday I'll tackle this myself, but I would not count on it.

Here's a few pictures of my progress and me at the end of one phase of the scraping. I swear I'm not wearing lipstick, I blame Michael Jordan for teaching my entire generation to stick out your tongue all the time when working hard. Each time I concentrate, I caught myself sticking out my tongue and licking my lips; popcorn ceiling texture and joint compound both taste awful. When I finished the only part of my body not covered in the fine white powder was my lips. My suggestion to other DIYers would be to wear some sort of mask.

Up next in the garage makeover is going to be brainstorming and researching alternative textures to the popcorn stuff, patching up the drywall on the ceiling and the walls, sanding the paint off the attic door, fixing the patch-job in the ceiling and then retexturing the ceiling and painting the walls of the garage. I'm looking forward to the next steps of my project and sharing about my failures, successes and any loss of limbs to power tools.

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My life as a "Brain"

2013-03-08T06:00:00Z

It's been happening all of my life, I've been receiving; junk mail, forms of identification, security badges, tax forms, credit cards, you name it.... all addressed to "Brain." I remember as a very small kid, my mother would try and spin it saying that it was a compliment - they thought I was so smart they called me Brain, but even back then I knew the truth: people are careless and lazy.

The first time I can recollect this happening was in elementary school. We were in the school library learning about how it works and being tasked with checking out a book when one of my classmates spotted a book named The Great Brain and remarked, "Oh look Brian, it's a book about you!"

Now in elementary school, I was quite forgiving with my classmates. Even though I perpetually received a dozens of Valentine's Day Cards, Birthday cards and invitations to various parties addressed to this "Brain" person. Given that I was having my own challenges with learning and writing the alphabet, it seemed then like it was a simple mistake that anyone could make and that we'd all grow out of it.

Boy, was I ever wrong about that. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong! I've found that it's gotten worse. It is practically a daily occurrence these days. Especially at work, almost every day an e-mail or instant message comes to me starting off with "Hello Brain," or "Brain." I like to think I'm usually tolerant of these lapses in attention, I'm quite empathetic. Besides, "brain" is an actual word learned our automatic spellcheckers, if there's not a squiggly little red line beneath it then it must be correct. As an experiment, I'll sometimes respond to those people in kind a transpose two letters in their names. This rarely goes unnoticed, I even had someone at a job in the past respond to me along these lines:

Dear Brain,

Why do you keep spelling my name wrong, it's not spelled "Miek"

Sincerely,

Mike

The day I received that response, I shook my head, left the office early that day and had a drink that night to the decline of our civilization. Our parents were correct, all that TV has rotted our brains.

Also as an experiment, I've tried the opposite. I've called and referred to myself as "Brain" in all sorts of e-mails. Most of the people who noticed that I was spelling my own name wrong were my friends who knew how badly this can get into my craw. But I did have one co-worker catch it and ask if I was being immodest, this clever coworker had a good chuckle when I explained my experiment but then proceeded to refer to me as "Brain" every chance that they got.

I thought I'd share two instances where I was called "Brain" that were especially memorable; one in the way distant past and another in the present:

Twenty Years Ago

In high school, I had joined the cross country team as something to do, my entire childhood I remember my Dad running including running the Long Island Marathon. Running seemed like it could be fun and suited my stubborn persistent nature. My senior year of high school, our family had relocated to another town about 90 minutes away. It was disappointing at the time to move away from all my friends and it was doubly disappointing since I had really gotten serious and dedicated to running and I had put myself in the position to be running with the varsity team. At my new school this wasn't certain at all. The new school a very competitive cross country program and it became quite apparent that what I had counted on at my previous school was no sure bet.

There wasn't anything that I could do other than play the hand that I had been dealt. I dedicated myself, worked my scrawny un-athletic tail off and did the best that I could. The hard work paid off in some respect, I was running better times than I ever had before. That entire season, I teetered on the border of the varisty and junior-varsity teams. My best was good and I was pleased with it, but it just worked out that my teammates were both more talented and worked just as hard as I did or even harder.

It was bittersweet during the middle of the cross country season when we wound up participating in the same meet(s) as my old high school did. It was good to see all of my old friends and teammates and as we discussed our seasons it was clear I'd definitely been among the guys on their varsity squad.

As the season ended, I was on the bubble of earning a letter for the Cross Country team. In adding up my accomplishments over the season, I had done the math and realized I was just a hair or two short of the coaches criteria. This was disappointing, but I had accepted it. However, at the team's end of the season banquet my coach had a surprise for me. He had contacted my old coach and asked him if I would've lettered at the old school and the answer had been yes. Based on that, he decided to award me the letter. Naturally, I was ecstatic.

At the same time, my family had planned a weekend trip down to our old hometown for the following weekend. My parents were kind enough to immediately order my letter jacket from the local sporting goods store and we ordered the jacket, and patches for my name to be beneath the left and right pockets on the jacket.

My jacket wouldn't be ready until the day of the trip down. I was very excited to see my good friends and show off my new jacket. After school that Friday I rushed to go pick up the jacket and upon picking it up I was crestfallen to see "Brain" emblazoned just below the pocket. Here it was, all my hard work paying off and resulting with that misspelling mocking me from the jacket. Thankfully, Mom was quick-thinking and she removed the patches with my name from the jacket and then the next week had them fix the error.

Just this Year

At the end of the year as company's budgets were finalized I was pursued by a few recruiters about jobs in my line of work. Having been pretty satisfied with where I was at the time, I told the recruiters that I'd interview for those jobs but that my socks would have to be knocked off in order for me to consider the positions.

Luckily for me, one job did just that. I accepted the position and started looking forward to the new challenges ahead of me. To describe my new work environment as a bit chaotic is probably putting it mildly. The company is growing very rapidly in numerous departments, during our little orientation session the HR people said they had 400 people starting new jobs just in the month of January alone. Because of the rush of new employees, some things fell through the cracks. Like a computer, a phone, and security badge. The first week at work involved quite a bit of sitting around and shoulder-surfing my new teammates as they showed me around. It's impossible to enter the building without a badge, so my first week I'd have to call up to one of my teammates and get them to let me in the building and escort me to the security desk where I could get a temporary badge that still wouldn't get me into the building.

I was pretty relieved when the security guy sent me an email explaining that he'd been trying to call me but I had no phone extension documented anywhere (it took a couple weeks to get a phone) and that he had a badge for me down at the security desk. I picked up the badge and took it back to my desk. As I joked with my coworkers about finally being a real employee, one of them smirked and replied:

"Sure Brain, you're a real employee now!"

I glanced down at the name on my badge and this is what I saw.

And just this week, this notification came to us about our dog, Crockett's, need for an upcoming vaccination:

At least I can find comfort in the fact that I'm not a "Bryan with a Y"

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Garage Makeover

2013-03-01T06:00:00Z

I rented for a really long time (probably longer than I should've), and one thing I absolutely hated about renting was that my car was always out in the elements, which meant in the unforgiving Texas summers, the inside of my car was always insanely hot. I lived in places that had covered parking, which was nice, but one of the things I always longed for was a garage. When we were house hunting, the garage wasn't at the top of my priority list, but I did scratch a few houses off the lists our real estate agent provided us because the garage had been converted into living space. And when actually visiting houses, the garage always got a close inspection.

When we visited this house for the first time, the garage was one of the selling points. It was in good shape; the previous owner had a great-looking garage with lots of organization and toolboxes. In hindsight, maybe I should have asked about getting that included in the negotiation.

When we moved in, the garage was completely empty save for a single bookshelf full of some paint cans and such, which I've come to appreciate. We had an old dilapidated bookshelf that we brought over from the old apartment, and we put it out in the garage for some additional storage.

Presently, the garage is in pretty good shape, but I have run out of organized places to put things. We've had to buy lots of garage-type equipment, like a lawn mower, leaf blower, weed whacker, brooms, shovels, ladders, etc. The garage has also been accumulating stored items like Christmas decorations, car stuff, and random things I don't want to carry up into the attic.

My inner OCD voice is telling me that the garage is messy and in need of some attention even though the pictures seem to suggest that it's relatively orderly. Because the last home improvement project we tackled turned out pretty well, I'm excited to tackle the garage.

I surveyed the garage and took some "before" pictures today. I've been brainstorming some ideas on how I can really improve the garage and hopefully add some value to the house. Here's a few of the ideas I have in mind:

Additional storage: This will probably come in several forms, shelving, cabinets, etc. Pat had a good suggestion on something he had helped a friend with-building closets in the garage, using the scissor-type closet doors to hide the mess behind them. I'd also like to build something to hang my ladders, saw horses, and various garden tools.
Ceiling and Walls: The ceiling of the garage has the popcorn-ceiling texture on it and since the house was built, it's been blistering and peeling away. I'd like to go ahead and remove it and re-surface the ceiling with something else. While I'm at it, I'd like to also re-paint the walls of the garage to make it look all brand-new.
Workbench: I'd definitely like some sort of workbench outside, somewhere I can organize and store some of my bigger tools and a place to do some work outside so I can keep messy stuff out in the garage. I've seen a ton of do-it-yourself shows and articles about making your own concrete countertops or tables. I think I might try and make a concrete surface for my workbench.

This is a much more ambitious home improvement project than my last one but hopefully it is about the same degree of difficulty. It is definitely a bigger project than the last one; I don't expect to knock this one out in a couple of days, and know that we'll be hard at work for quite some time.

I've already taken a stab at scraping off the ceiling texture. Some of that is very cathartic work - bad day at the office? Come on over and skin the ceiling of my garage for a bit. Those chunks of falling popcorn ceiling will have you feeling better in no time flat, I guarantee it. I took a couple photos of my progress. Off of bare drywall, the stuff falls right off. But off of the joint compound, it doesn't scrape off easily at all. I suspect that I'll spend quite a bit of time scraping that with something like a putty knife and then sanding it down.

I will probably talk about the plans for the storage and workbench in my next blog on this topic. We've been through a couple brainstorming sessions and I think I need to start putting some of those ideas down on paper to use as our pseudo-blueprints.

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How I Fought Back Against the Unrelenting Telemarketer

2013-02-22T06:00:00Z

We've all had to deal with it: You're sitting there at home/work/the toilet and your phone rings unexpectedly. If you're smart, you check the caller ID and you don't recognize the number. You take a deep breath, answer the phone, and then you hear it--a brief pause as the robo-dialer connects you with a person and the background hum of drones on phones is hummed out into your ear. A tentative "Hello?" crackles through the speaker as someone launches into their phone script.

Very few things aggravate me more than this, E-mail spam is barely tolerable, but phone spam is like declaring war on my peace of mind. Sometimes these phone calls come from places that I do business with, wanting to share updates or alerts with me, and sometimes there are charities calling, soliciting donations in order to further their good works. I don't exactly care for these kinds of phone calls, but I will tolerate them politely and ask to be removed from their calling list.

In the recent past, my number winds up in the robo-dialer's database of turds like the ones I dealt with in the middle of February. In the matter of a 2-day time span I had over two-dozen phone calls from the same place at almost all hours of the day (between 8AM and 10PM). Early on, they were calling and asking to speak to someone other than me; the callers all spoke in Indian-accented English and never really broke from script when I explained that the indistinguishable name they were uttering into the phone did not answer this line. In the first five or six phone calls, in tones varying from polite to psychotic I told them repeatedly that they had the wrong number and that I didn't want them calling back again. I continued to get repeated phone calls throughout the day from these people.

What's worse is that these people were not above board. They ignored my requests and they were calling to explain that I (or whomever they thought my number belonged to) was pre-approved for a loan of some sorts. If it doesn't already, this kind of unsolicited notification is textbook phishing. Bait the hook with the $1500 loan offer, get some personal information from the mark and then do God-knows-what to the victim's credit.

At one point, in frustration I tweeted at T-Mobile. They were polite and helpful, but there's really not much that they can do. I supplied them with the numbers that were showing up on my Caller ID but that's easily faked, and that was evidenced by the fact that some of the numbers that were showing up on my phone came from area codes that don't exist. The construction of our phone systems is explotiable and it certainly seemed that these miscreants were doing exactly that. Having been down this road with T-Mobile in the past, about all they could offer to help me with was to change my phone number, which to me is like plowing down the entire forest so that we won't have to put out any forest fires. It's their best solution, but they really need to come up with a better one.

Instead, I decided to handle the situation differently in a two-pronged approach: 1. I would get my hands on an Android App to help deal with the spam. 2. To seek revenge, I would punish the telemarketers by spending as much time as humanly possible on the phone.

Firstly, I had read an interesting article on an app named Sanity in a blog article on Lifehacker. The long and the short of it, you could use the app to handle incoming phone calls and texts in different manners. In my particular case, I created a special contact in my phone and associated every one of the phone numbers from the spammers with that contact. Then I configured Sanity to handle incoming calls from that contact by answering the phone on mute and then turning off the cellular antenna effectively dropping the call without allowing it to get to either my voicemail or me.

Secondly, I wanted to prepare myself for the eventuality that their unrelenting phone calls would slip by Sanity. I wanted to have fun by putting on the show for my would-be scammer and turn the tables on them a bit. Thankfully, I got my chance late on Friday after an especially frustrating week at work--just what the doctor ordered! Originally, I had intended to record this phone call (the app, Sanity, can do that too) but I failed to get it to record correctly. Unfortunately, this call took place during work hours and I had to do my best to keep it work-appropriate. Had I been home, this conversation would've taken a much different deviant direction.

Brian: Hello?

Scammer: Hello may I speak to name indistinguishable please?

Brian: This is he, how can I help you?

Scammer: Hello, name indistinguishable, my name is Richard and I am pleased to inform you that you have pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: $1500, huh? That's incredible!

Richard: Yes! Now in order to get your money I'm going to need to get some information from you.

Brian: Ummm. Hello? Can you hear me?

Richard: Yes, I am here.

Brian: Why are you calling?

Richard: I am calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: Hello?

Richard: I am calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: You want to give me $1500?

Richard: No, I am calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: Potato.

Richard: Excuse me? I am calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: I really like potatoes, how about you?

Richard: I'm sorry, I don't understand. I'm calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: I don't think that $1500 is enough money, I need more than that.

Richard: Pardon?

Brian: $1500 is not a substantial enough amount of money; I need way more than that.

Richard: How much?

Brian: At least twelve million dollars.

Richard: ...

Brian: Yes, definitely twelve million dollars.

Richard: I am calling to inform you that you have been pre-approved for a loan in the amount of $1500.

Brian: That's a step in the right direction, Richard, but I'm going to need twelve million dollars. I won't accept a penny less.

Richard: Can you hold please?

Phone: insanely atrocious and loud hold music

Phone: different equally atrocious hold music at a lower volume

Supervisor: Hello, I am Richard's supervisor, you've been pre-approved for a $1500 loan.

Brian: This isn't Richard?

Supervisor: No, I am Richard's supervisor.

Brian: Oh my goodness, where did Richard go?

Supervisor: Richard had to go deal with other business.

Brian: I'm a little worried, Richard sounded like he was distracted. Is everything all right with Richard?

Supervisor: Richard is quite fine, you've been pre-approved for a $1500 loan.

Brian: I'm disappointed that Richard didn't tell you.

Supervisor: Tell me what?

Brian: $1500 isn't enough. I need 12 million dollars.

Supervisor: But you've only been pre-approved for a $1500 loan.

Brian: I understand, but I need at least 12 million dollars to be interested.

Supervisor: We only do $1500 loans.

Brian: I understand. I'm not trying to be difficult I can work within your framework.

Supervisor: Good, so you'll be interested in the $1500 loan?

Brian: Yes, I will need eight thousand of them.

Supervisor: What?

Brian: Eight thousand.

Supervisor: I don't understand.

Brian: Eight thousand different $1500 loans. That way I can get 12 million dollars that I need.

Supervisor: Where do want this from?

Brian: What do you mean?

Supervisor: The twelve million dollars, I suppose you want it from my wallet?

Brian: Holy cow, you have twelve million dollars?!

Supervisor: ...

Brian: That's awesome, do you want to send it to me via wire transfer?

Supervisor: Why are you doing this?

Brian: Doing what?

Supervisor: (angrily) We don't waste your time, why do you waste our time? You don't want to talk to us then just hang up! click

By the time I had finished this phone call, I had inadvertently gotten the attention of all my cubicle-neighbors, most of which were in some sort of giggle fit. Myself, I had almost lost it a couple times; sometimes it's really hard to be mischievous and keep a straight face. I found it to be insanely ironic that after calling me 20+ times in a two-day span, that Richard's supervisor was angry at me for wasting their time. Had he actually bothered to stay on the phone instead of having a temper tantrum and hanging up, I would've explained to him that this was what I was going to do each and every time that he or one of his employees called me. I would waste as much of their time as I possibly could until they figured out how to get my number omitted from their robo-dialer.

I had absolutely no expectation that anything would change. In fact, I half expected for Richard's supervisor to call me even more frequently just for pissing him off. But in my total and complete surprise, this was virtually the last phone call of this nature that I had. I wound up taking a couple more calls the next day, but the Sanity app intercepted and hung up on those calls without it interrupting or aggravating me. Maybe it's just a coincidence that they stopped calling, but I like to think that I made them understand what they were going to have to deal with each and every time they called me and decided it'd be better to not have to deal with my cunning wit and knack for aggravation.

Ultimately, what I decided is that for everyone, time is money. Every minute of the telemarketers' time I was able to use up, that's one less potential victim they could be talking to. If everyone took this approach to dealing with telemarketers, then I suspect it wouldn't be viable to keep making these kind of calls. It'd be awesome if we could change their behavior and drive these kinds of companies out of business.

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Adding Share Buttons to MovableType 5

2013-02-15T06:00:00Z

When I first started this blog, one of the things I found most attractive about MovableType 5 was that I wasn't going to have to invest a bunch of time in the design side of the blog software. I'm not an especially stylish guy; most of the time I'm impressed if I can manage to wear a shirt that matches my pants. I was able to pick one of the out-of-the-box blog themes and start writing.

I did, however find some of the "guts" of MovableType 5 pretty interesting, and among the first things I did was to start modifying some of the templates to add some features that I liked. The "Related Articles" list is one of the first modifications that I made.

I also wanted to have some sharing buttons, mostly for my own convenience, so that a reader could easily share entries with their favorite social networks. Up until recently, I only had a Google+ button and a Tweet button. I tinkered with other buttons, but I noticed a couple things that I didn't like about the buttons:

The buttons available from the different social media network outlets didn't quite line up nicely, which I assume is intentional to discourage people from using multiple buttons.
There was a discernible page load issue. The different buttons usually involved a piece of javascript which called back to the social media page and then presented the button to the user. When loading a page, all of the blog content would load up quickly, and then a moment or two later, the social media buttons would show up.

Because the vanilla buttons available to me via the social media sites didn't line up nicely and were noticeably slow when loading pages, I wanted to dig in a little further and figure out how I could find my own buttons hosted locally.

I wound up very seriously considering ShareThis and AddThis but ultimately I wound up having some of the same problems I had with the other buttons, plus all of your links wound up getting redirected through the ShareThis and AddThis service. I was appreciative that they had some options that I was considering, but I didn't quite feel comfortable with redirecting a bunch of my social media traffic through either of their sites.

The first thing I did was to set out and try and find some nice free buttons. I tinkered and re-sized them a few times but didn't care much for the results.

The second thing I did was to identify which Social Networks would allow me to build some sort of share button with a simple URL call. That way I could use the good 'ole anchor tag and make my own crude share buttons that would get the job done. Here's a sample of each that I used:

Twitter

&url=<$mt:EntryPermalink encode_url="1"$>" target="_blank">

Google+

" target="_blank">

Facebook

&t=<$mt:EntryTitle encode_url="1"$>" target="_blank">

StumbleUpon

" target="_blank">

Lastly, the most complicated thing I had to do was to tinker with MovableType. I had a simple requirement; for each entry displayed, the share button would share the unique URL to that entry. This winds up complicating things a bit due to the different kinds of pages that have multiple entries on them like the main index, category archive, monthly archive, and other pages. I tinkered with putting the buttons in a number of different places, but I wound up deciding that the best place for them was vertically in the upper left-hand corner of each entry. I wound up sticking a div element in there and then wrapping the entry body around that div. After spot-checking a few articles, I declared myself victorious. In the end, I only had to make changes in the following templates: Entry and Entry Summary. Because all the pages incorporate these two templates to build their pages, the new share buttons wound up being displayed in all of the places that I wanted.

I did not do exhaustive research on the multitudes of different social media websites out there; in my research only Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and StumbleUpon allowed the functionality that matched up with my needs. I'm sure that there are ways to use other social media website's share functionality similarly as I have here. As I find ways to add new buttons, I'll come back and update this blog. If you know have a similar method and want to share it, feel free to leave it in the comments.

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DIY NAS: 2013 Edition

2013-01-18T07:30:00Z

About a year ago, I published a series of blogs about building a DIY NAS (Network Attached Storage) which has been a pretty popular series of articles judging by the traffic it sees. Looking at my Google Analytics many of the search queries that drive traffic to my blogs seem to be from people who want to do something similar. Since my original articles are over a year old, I thought it would be a good subject for an additional article to write about building a NAS at the beginning of 2013.

So far, I couldn't be happier with my NAS. I use it primarily for the backups of all of our PCs. Additionally, I upgraded my computer at the end of 2012 and the NAS came in pretty handy there in holding backups and offloading nearly 2 terabytes worth media storage onto the NAS.

If a friend were building a NAS today, I would suggest very much that he go the same route that I went; to start with FreeNAS and then to either use spare PC parts lying around the house or to build a new PC using inexpensive, low-power parts and as many hard drives as he could afford. Assuming my friend didn't have a cache of spare PC parts like I seem to perpetually have, here's a summary of new parts that I'd suggest:

Motherboard & CPU

Motherboard wound up being the most difficult decision that I made last time, and this time was no different. The ideal motherboard is a unique creature something inexpensive, low-power, with gigabit Ethernet and as many SATA ports as possible. In my research, I found the ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 which features: a mini-ITX form factor, an integrated AMD dual core 1.0GHz processor, on board gigabit Ethernet and a whopping 6 SATA ports for a really reasonable price of $79.99.

Even if you have a ton of spare PC parts lying around, this may wind up being a better deal in the long run. The power-sipping features of the mini-ITX form factor mean your daily operational costs for running the NAS are going to be cheaper. In my original research, I determined that the amount of power the mini-ITX motherboard would save me over a traditional motherboard amounted to about $75.00 a year, which means combined the motherboard & CPU would nearly pay for itself in the first 12 months.

Running Total: $79.99

RAM

The hardware recommendations page for FreeNAS says that the best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS box is to give it as much RAM as you can. The motherboard I picked can support up to 8GB of RAM, so I went ahead and priced out the maximum amount of memory that the motherboard would support. A two piece set of the G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB DDR3 1066 F3-8500CL7D-8GBRL would wind up costing $51.95.

Update: It was pointed out to me in a Tweet that this motherboard will actually support up to 16 GB of RAM. For an additional $70 you can bring the system RAM up to 16GB. Seems like a very worthy upgrade to me. Thanks, @plgelinas!

Running Total: $131.94

Case

In my original build, the case is something I splurged on buying, a nice Lian-Li micro-ATX case. The case looks great in my office and I'm pretty happy with it. But this time around, I wanted to try and build an inexpensive NAS to show how much prices have fallen in the past year. Since I only bought four drives last year, I reduced the number of bays in my search criteria. The COOLER MASTER Elite 120 matches the criteria (mini-ITX, at least 4 drive bays, inexpensive) very well at $49.99. This case doesn't come with a power supply, so I tacked on an additional $33.86 for a 250W mini-ITX power supply.

Running Total: $215.79

Storage

FreeNAS Drive

In a typical FreeNAS installation, the OS & FreeNAS is installed and configured on a separate drive than the actual storage drives for the NAS. The suggested drive for attaching FreeNAS is actually a USB drive. In my build, I wound up buying a USB header that I plugged right into the motherboard and then zip tied the thumb drive inside the case somewhere inconspicuous. I recently bought another USB storage device for holding my music library in the car and at it's size it's entirely unnecessary to install this in the case. It can plug right into one of the USB ports on the back of the computer without getting in the way. The SanDisk Cruzer Fit - 8GB is more than adequately sized to hold what's needed for FreeNAS and it only costs $7.99.

Running Total: $223.78

NAS Drives

Here's the meat and potatoes of any NAS build. If I recall correctly, my drives accounted for around 66% of the cost of my entire build last time around. This time, that percentage went up, because I didn't splurge in some of the areas I splurged in for the last build. To reduce the impact of bad drives in particular batches, I wound up picking two of two different 3TB model drives:

Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001	Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB WD30EZRX

$129.99	$139.99

Update: robvdl brings up a good point about the Western Digital drives in his comment below. I was previously unaware and researched a bit and have discovered this is an issue with WD Green and WD Black drives. However, I've been using two WD Green 2.0 TB drives in my FreeNAS box and haven't had any issues so far in the year that I've been using it. The Western Digital Red 3.0 TB - WD30EFRX carries a heftier price tag of $156.86 (an additional $26.87 per drive). Based off of my research, I would recommend finding a different drive than the WD Green or WD Black drives despite the fact I've been using them now for over a year without any issues.

Altogether, these four drives account for an additional $539.96. Each drive is in the ballpark of the prices that I spent last year, but comes with the added 1TB of additional space on each drive, for a total of 4 additional TBs. That's a pretty significant boost in storage compared to the NAS I built at the beginning of 2012.

Final Price: $763.74

Conclusion

In 2012, I paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $850-$900 for my FreeNAS machine. It wound up containing a total of 8TB of storage space. By juggling around the prices a little bit this year I was able to price out a fairly equivalent machine with an additional 50% of usable storage space for the NAS. Dropping this machine down to an 8TB FreeNAS would've brought the price down between $20-$30 per drive down to a very reasonable price range of $650 to $685. Because of FreeNAS and falling hardware prices, it's getting quite affordable to build a very functional NAS for your home storage needs.

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BrianMoses.net is now a Teenager!

2013-01-17T06:00:00Z

According to my registrar and some of my notes, BrianMoses.net came to be 13 years ago today. I originally purchased the domain name because I thought it was cool and interesting that I could do such a thing. After buying it, however, it went unused for some time. Later on I thought that it might set me apart from other job candidates that I had gone out and purchased my own domain. This is when I put up my own web server and email server. Seeing as how I wanted to work in the Information Technology field, it seemed like an interesting gimmick. I can't remember the subject ever being brought up in any kind of job interview, so maybe it wasn't the most effective gimmick. Nevertheless, it's been a neat toy to tinker with from time to time.

I've had some fun over the years, hosting my own content. I've never really saved any of the old content because it's always been a little embarrassing. Usually when I would look at the old content it made me feel sheepish and like a great big dork. My self-designed websites have always been very simple and not much to look at. I've learned to gradually become more comfortable with the fact I'm a gigantic geek and that I have little to offer in the category of web design.

Thankfully, we live in the digital age and anything embarrassing is guaranteed to be preserved out there forever. Using web.archive.org you can dig up some of the first versions of my website. The dates available don't quite line up with when it was first stood up, but the versions and content seem to be mostly intact.

Here's a look at the front page of my website over the past thirteen years. As you can tell from these samples, web design's not really my thing, and the world is probably grateful I took a more behind-the-scenes approach and let my content management system do the heavy lifting design-wise.

July 2001

November 2002

April 2006

December 2010

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Share your WiFi Access Point via InstaWifi

2013-01-16T06:00:00Z

Ever since buying our Nexus 7 tablets (two of them), a Samsung Galaxy SIII, and a Nexus 4 I've been trying to think of nifty everyday uses for NFC. I explored creating a Card Dock Profile blog post a few months ago. I wanted to use NFC to completely automate my car dock profile but ultimately I found that the app Tasker was better suited for what I wanted.

My complaint with NFC has been that it can only trigger a series of events. For example, if you want to make a "silent" profile for your phone you can create a NFC tag and set it next to your bed. When you place the phone near that tag it sets your phone to silent. However, if you want to turn silent mode off the next morning, you will either have to do that manually or create a second NFC tag to undo the silent mode and then manually touch it. For me, this what was insufficient. I wanted to be able to create proximity-based actions to trigger a series of events when the phone was close to an NFC tag and then when the phone exited the proximity of that tag then trigger another series of other events.

Since I couldn't quite do what I wanted with NFC, I've been searching for other interesting uses for NFC. In my prior article's research, I came across a fantastic app called InstaWifi. InstaWiFi is a free app (donations are encouraged) that will share any of the WiFi access points stored in your Android device. It shares them in two ways:

Encoding the AP details to an NFC tag.
Writing the AP details in a QR Code.

The details embedded in the NFC tag or QR code contain all the information including the password needed to connect to the stored Access Points.

The minute I came across this app, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I'd print up and laminate a card with the QR code on one side and then place an NFC tag on the back of the card. What I went ahead and did, was:

Picked up some Self-Sealing Laminating Pouches
I used InstaWifi to create a QR code and then emailed it to myself.
I created a document sized it to the pouches I purchased (4"x6") and included some directions on how to scan the QR code and NFC tag.
Printed the document and then cut it to size the NFC tag.
Used InstaWifi to encode a NFC tag I had purchased earlier.
I adhered the NFC tag to the back of the printed document.
Sealed everything up into the laminating pouch.

Now, I have a nice little laminated card that I just hand to my guests when they want to get on the WiFi. I have tested the QR code on a handful of different devices and the NFC tag on at least three different devices without any problems.

In lieu of printing a card like I did, you can also use your phone/tablet to share the WiFi AP. You can use NFC to beam the WiFi app directly to another device, or for non-NFC devices you can scan the QR code displayed on your device from the other device.

So far, of all the different uses for NFC I've tinkered around with, this has to be my favorite use. NFC has come in handy for a few things, but the things it's been handy for aren't unique to NFC. For example, sharing files is a pretty nifty NFC use, but there's plenty of other, often better, options for sharing files; email attachments, a direct bluetooth file transfer, DropBox, etc. In this particular case, I think my preference for sharing WiFi AP details is NFC followed by the QR code. Both of these bases are covered by InstaWiFi, which I recommend for all Android device users.

The author, Jessie Chen, created a nice walkthrough for the app on Youtube:

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My Network Cupboard: Adding a networked Printer

2013-01-16T06:00:00Z

In the beginning of 2012, I completed a DIY project to wire up my house with ethernet cable that gave me grand schemes for the things I wanted to do inside my house with computers; Networked Attached Storage, a multi-media PC, replace the home phone with Asterisk, etc... The list is virtually endless. One of the things high up on that list was to put some sort of network printing in there. We hardly ever print documents but when we do it is a minor hassle. The PC that shares the printer is never on or the sharing is being fussy For some time, I have wanted to bypass all that hassle by attaching the printer to the network.

The Pre-existing Condition

My path to attaching the printer to the network has been blocked for quite a while by my old printer. Like lots of consumers, when I bought this printer I did not really put much thought into what I really needed a printer for. To my chagrin, I wound up picking an inkjet printer with an integrated scanner. I thought I was being wise when I picked a printer that had multiple cartridges (black, yellow, blue, red) because I knew the majority of the printing I would need to do would be in black and white. I wanted something with a separate black cartridge so that I could just keep printing in black & white if the color ran out. Unfortunately for me, the printer that I chose would complain and refuse to print at all if it determined that any of the cartridges was empty or defective. Given the nature of inkjet cartridges drying up, I basically was never really able to print when I wanted to. In the two or so years I have owned this printer, I would be absolutely shocked if I ever got more than 20-30 pages out of a set of cartridges. When you consider that a set of cartridges cost roughly $65 to replace, clearly I had made a poor decision in the purchase of this printer.

Choosing a New Printer

A couple weeks ago, I started shopping for a new printer. Because of how rarely we print, price was important. I needed something economical, network capable, reliable and it absolutely could not have ink cartridges. Based on my prior experience I wound up deciding that a laser printer was probably best for us.

Color or Black and White

Ever since the first injket printer, color printers have been readily available with a low up-front cost. But what advantages do you really get of owning a color printer of any sort? Is that set of driving directions from Google Maps really all that more useful in color? Is the recipe you found on the Internet easier to prepare because it is in color? As far as I can think, the answer is "No" except for one regard: the printing of pictures. However, with services like Shutterfly, Snapfish and the digital printing available at your local retailers, you can get a much better quality print at a lower cost than if you did it yourself on your printer.

Built-in Network Connectivity vs. Print Server

The second decision I had to contemplate was whether to purchase a printer with integrated network capability or to pick some sort of Print Server. I have been tinkering with and looking at prices of computer components for decades. The last time I looked at a print server they were still pretty expensive so initially my search began with printers that had on-board ethernet. I was surprised at the number printers that had onboard Ethernet but the starting price was a little higher than I had in mind, so I went back and looked at print servers.

Interestingly enough, print servers are cheap compared to what I remember. Starting around $25-$30, you can get a USB 2.0 print server. I dug around both Newegg and Amazon reading scores of reviews on about a half dozen different print servers.

Decision

I wound up deciding on getting the TL-PS310U made by TP-Link as my print server (specs) from Amazon for about $36. For my printer, I decided to go with the Brother HL2230 (specs) which I found on sale at Newegg for $64. The price and footprint wound up being the deciding factors on my purchase of the printer.

Setup

Setting everything up was pretty simple. The print server showed up a day early. Using my OpenWRT router, I assigned a preferred IP for the DHCP to assign to the Printer Server. The printer server came with some management software that I loaded up to make it dummy-proof. Once I had installed the printer server's software, I was able to hook up the printer and Windows 7 automatically pulled down drivers. The only wrinkle that I ran into is that the print server had a "disconnect from Printer if idle for 30 seconds" option that made installing the printer's drivers difficult. I had to disable that option in order to get the drivers installed. The print server also hosts a small Web UI that you can hit in a browser.

Regrets

These regrets are pretty minor but I thought I'd point them out for anyone who was interested. The web interface on the TL-PS310U print server was terribly slow, it seemed to be lacking some of the features available in the management software and it does not load up correctly in Chrome which caused me to have open it up in a different browser. In my case my alternate browser is Internet Explorer and I die a little bit on the inside each time I have to open Internet Explorer. My other "complaint" isn't really directed at anything in general except for maybe the electrical system in my house. Every time the printer warms up, I get an almost imperceptible flicker in the lights and both of the computers in the den receive and display complaints from their UPSes about the power blip. Laser printers have always drawn a ton of power when they first come online; I shouldn't have been so surprised about the drop in power across the circuit in my den.

Conclusion

Having never really tinkered with or messed with a network-attached printer aside from muttering profanities at the various printers I have had to use at my various jobs, this was relatively painless. Especially when you consider that I went the ultra low-budget route. For roughly $100, I wound up getting a printer and hooking it up to my network without any issues so far on any of the PCs in our house. I am pretty confident that the toner in this printer isn't going to need replacing in a couple of months even if it goes completely neglected. If you're looking for an easy way to share a USB printer, I recommend this TL-PS310U print server.

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Computer Upgrade 2012: The Results

2013-01-11T06:00:00Z

This holiday season was especially tortuous; I had a mountain of computer parts sitting in my office taunting me while I was enjoying the holidays with family and friends. Sure, I was happy to be spending that time with them, but it was a little bittersweet since I wanted also to be playing with my shiny new toys.

On New Year's Eve, I got started opening boxes and assembling the computer. For the most part, everything went together very smoothly. Between starting to put everything together and putting the wrapping touches on this blog, I encountered two minor problems and two major ones:

Minor Problems

The CPU Cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus) I bought was ginormous; it was virtually bigger than my head! It took a little bit of elbow grease and sweat to get it mounted correctly and squeezed into the case.
The monitor had a sticker on it that was very difficult to peel off the bezel. It took me longer to carefully remove the sticker than what it took for the operating system, Windows 7, to load from scratch.

Major Problems

The RAM I bought, Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000) , is being auto-detected at 1333MHz instead of 1866MHz. Manually setting the RAM's multiplier results in the motherboard saying you're being too aggressive in your overclocking, and defaulting back to 1333MHz. I spoke with Corsair's technical support people and they turned me on to this DDR3 Memory Frequency Guide from AMD. Apparently, when using all 4 DIMM slots it's not possible to run at 1866MHz. This was an unfortunate mistake I didn't catch in time. I suppose I could return the RAM and exchange it for something cheaper, or I could spend quite a few more bucks and get 2x16GB 1600MHz to stay at 32GB total and almost attain the faster speed I wanted. In the end, I was so happy with the machine, I didn't want the cost savings from buying slower RAM or the performance gain of working around this you-cant-run-4-DIMMs-at-1866MHz-on-AMD-FX-CPUs issue.
Before the upgrade, I was unaware that Windows 7 Home Premium is limited to a maximum of 16GB of System RAM. After tinkering with limiting the system RAM for disk benchmarks, I stumbled across the fact that Windows was reporting a system of 32GB system RAM, but only 16GB of it was usable. In order to get to use all 32GB of the RAM, I had upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional (or Ultimate). The most disappointing part of this was that it cost me an additional $90 to do the Windows Anytime Upgrade.

The Butt Dyno

For those of you not into cars, the Butt Dyno is an unscientific way for a driver to measure the effect of an upgrade to his car. It's not a precise or specific measurement, but it's significant; if you could feel the effect of the upgrade then you could enjoy the upgrade and brag about it to your friends. The same can be applied to computers; you don't need an armful of system benchmarks to conclude that your PC is faster-you just need to sit at it for awhile.

My initial impressions for my new computer can be summed up in a single word: Wow!

Firstly, the display is nothing short of amazing when compared next to my old display. The monitor is extremely bright, crisp, and expansive both in size and resolution. I'm going to need to start finding software to help me set up and manage a window layout in order to make the best use of all the territory that is now in front of me.

Secondly, the computer is incredibly responsive and fast. In every aspect of use; boot time, opening up applications, working with browsers with dozens of open tabs, etc... I fired up my favorite game, Team Fortress 2 and used Chris's TF2 Configs to set all of the video details to maximum and run at my display's native resolution of 2560x1440. My frame rate was consistently in the 80+ range. Considering that within the last month I had to use one of the more basic configs to drop down the detail in order to keep my frame rate playable, this was astonishing to me. With the graphics details turned all the way up, the game looked and felt fantastic but remained completely playable. Despite TF2's relative old age, I can't remember ever being able to take one of my favorite video games and play it at maximum detail and have it feel enjoyable after this kind of an upgrade.

Now, the only problem with the Butt Dyno is that it is always subjective. Just about any recent computer is going to feel much better than my three-year-old PC. The butt dyno results are very encouraging but whether or not I achieved my goal of tripling my performance will also be determined by the benchmarks and comparisons to the results from the old PC.

Benchmarks

I was really excited to get the benchmarks running; for all benchmarks I used all the same settings from my previous benchmarks. The only exception is that I added an additional benchmark of the Crucial M4 SSD to see if there was any added benefit from the six extra cores I now have with regards to disk I/O.

Processor / GPU / System

I started off with my GPU benchmark first, because I knew it would be my smallest boost in performance. I had previously upgraded the video card in my machine roughly 12 to 18 months ago. Because of my budget, I wasn't able to triple the number of CUDA cores, so I had to settle with only doubling the number of available CUDA cores. I was expecting to see the least amount of improvement here. My original score was P8199. Running the same exact benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of P16902. Which was an increase of 206%.

Then I ran Geekbench; previously my old system had scored a 2847. After some whirring and clicking the new PC scored a respectable 10545, an increase of 370%, which was well past my goal of tripling overall performance.

I followed that up with the overall system benchmark, PCMark Vantage. Earlier, my old computer had scored 3671. Running the same benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of 14228, an unexpected increase of 388%. I had expected the graphics component to weigh down the improvement just a tad, but the performance increases in other areas more than made up for it and nearly quadrupled my score.

Show:

Disk

Just like I was only expecting meager gains from the video card, I anticipated extraordinary gains beyond my goal moving from a platter drive up to a solid-state drive. I had some problems trying to run the same exact settings as before; specifically I had the benchmark create a file that 10 * the amount of system RAM to negate the benefits of caching. However, since I have 32 GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, clearly I would wind up creating a file much larger than the total capacity of the SSD. Furthermore, I was using the SSD as my primary storage, and after loading up all my apps, the SSD only had 85 GB free. What I decided to do was to limit the amount of RAM using Windows boot parameters. That way, I could bring total system RAM back down to 2GB and reproduce my prior benchmark settings.

The good news is that the SSD is many, many magnitudes superior than my old hard drive. The bad news is that it's SO much better, that I had a really difficult time getting to the data on a graph and have it make sense. We had to put three different y-axes on the graph in order for it to make the most amount of sense.

Basically, when running the same exact settings in IOMeter, Total I/Os Per Second increased from 405 to 36,512 (over 9000% improvement) and Total MBs/Second increased from 5.2 to 142.63 (over 2700% improvement). Overall, disk performance increased so far beyond my 300% goal that it's almost comical.

What I Could Have Done Differently

The two major problems drove up my price up by another $100.00 or so. Firstly, wanting to have 32GB of RAM forced me to upgrade my OS, which was a substantial unplanned expense. Secondly, I paid a premium to buy 1866MHz RAM that I have to run at 1333MHz because I filled up all 4 DIMM slots. Had I been a little more thorough in my shopping and research I would've chosen to do either of the following to try and under $1000 total:

Only buy 16GB of 1600MHz RAM: This would've saved me $90 on the Windows upgrade plus, around an additional $90 in the cost of the actual RAM. This would've put me well below my budget of $1000.
Buy 32GB of 1333MHz RAM: This only would've saved me $20-30 dollars total; I still would've had to pay for the upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional

Conclusion

Ultimately, I hit one goal and missed the other. In almost every measurable regard my computer is at least three times as powerful as my prior computer. It literally runs circles around the old computer and as far as upgrades go, this is the one that stands out as the most impressive that I can remember.

The goal I failed on was the budgetary goal I set out for myself. And I'm more than satisfied missing out on that goal. I wanted to prove that for $1000 you could buy a very nice computer and display. By tweaking components a little bit and/or waiting for prices to fall over, time this is very attainable. I exceeded the $1000 mark, but that enabled me to buy a bigger SSD and get my new computer up to 32 GB of total system RAM. In the long run, these splurges will be well worth the money spent. Now, you'll have to excuse me. I have a hankering to play Team Fortress 2 at 2560x1440 with every video option set at the maximum setting.

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Computer Upgrade 2012: The Display

2013-01-04T06:00:00Z

As part of my computer upgrade, I decided my display could use an upgrade as well, and I budgeted in the neighborhood of $300 to spend on the monitor. The monitor that I currently have has been with me even longer than the PC that was being upgraded. I started browsing all the IPS displays I could find on Amazon and dug through lots of reviews.

Dual Head vs. Single Head

A long, long time ago. I bought two 17" CRT monitors off of some special deal for about the price of one and picked up a 2nd video card for my computer. That has to be around the worst-possible dual-head setup possible. The monitors were ginormous and occupied 110% of my available desk space; the desk even slightly buckled under their weight. Despite all the problems, I was hooked. I've had more than one display for quite awhile up until this computer. I was tempted to split my display budget in half and find the very best deal I could find on a monitor. There were a ton of monitors in my price range; in fact so many that it made digging through all the different brands and monitors a bit daunting.

The other choice would be to find the biggest & best display around $300 and continue to live a single monitor lifestyle. I've certainly grown accustomed to this, and I don't entirely mind it. A few months ago, one of my favorite bloggers wrote this great article about 27" 2560x1440 displays ordered directly from Korea. Comparable monitors obtained locally are still quite expensive compared to these displays. If you look at comprable "local" monitors on your various sites, they all seem to be starting in the $700 ballpark.

Ultimately, this was practically a coin flip. The cost and performance of the two smaller monitors actually nudges out (in my opinion) the bigger monitor by just a hair. If you can find two 1920x1080 IPS displays for about $300 then you get more pixels at a lesser price. On the other hand, when using two displays you have the bezels of the two monitors acting as a barrier between the two displays. And if you like to sit centered behind one monitor like I do then you incur significant diminishing returns on that second monitor, even more so if you're frequently doing things like playing games full screened like I tend to do.

Decision

In the end I decided I would focus on one monitor enough that I should go ahead and buy the biggest and baddest monitor my budget would allow. One of these Korean 27" 2560x1440 IPS displays lines up perfectly with what I'm trying to accomplish. There's no shortage of them listed on eBay and they all seem to be priced right around $300.00. Most of the sub-$300 were auction-style listings; because I'm famously impatient, I picked the cheapest "Buy it Now" listing I could find from a well-reviewed seller and ordered one for $319.90. Here's a link to the auction, and a screenshot if the listing expires.

The long and short of itm is that it's a no-frills 27" monitor with an IPS display and a gargantuan resolution of 2560x1440. The only drawback that I could think of was the lack of any other allowed inputs other than DVI-Dual. As far as I'm concerned that's not really much of a drawback at all, but it may inhibit some users out there. In worst-case scenario mode, I had some concerns about what might happen if the transaction went poorly. I also expected a tremendous amount of shipping time, but it was ordered on 12/22 and delivered by 12/27. In my opinion, that's nothing short of miraculous, considering there was a weekend and a holiday between the order and delivery. All in all, I'm pretty comfortable with the purchase and the decision. My only regret was not being able to afford one or two more of the monitors to set up a really expansive amount of display real estate.

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Computer Upgrade 2012: The PC Components

2012-12-28T06:00:00Z

So, at the the end of 2012 we decided to go ahead and buy a new computer. I had a pretty firm budget: $1300 total; $1000 for the computer and $300 for the monitor(s). My other goal in the upgrade was to improve system performance by at least three times. In my prior article, I took a bunch of benchmarks to gauge just how "fast" my current machine was.

Newegg vs. Amazon

If you've read prior articles, or you know me at all, then you know I'm a huge Newegg fan. I've bought parts from them for over the past decade. Not every part, just the majority of them. Recently, my friend Pat hooked us up with Amazon Prime. Because of the holidays, I was pretty excited to get free two day shipping on all of my computer parts. In doing my research, Amazon was cheaper on quite a few of the same components that I was looking at on Newegg. However, in the end it's probably a moot point, as Amazon is charging sales tax in Texas and that probably ended up eating up most of the items' price savings.

Meeting the "Upgrade" Requirement

In order to call it an upgrade, a few components need to carry on from the prior machine. In my case, there's not much worth carrying forward. Almost the video card, but I definitely want to upgrade that. The power supply I bought to drive that video card will definitely move forward, as will the hard disk drive for some additional storage. And finally, I'm going to use my Windows 7 license. As an additional bonus, I have a 2 TB hard drive that I've been using in an external enclosure that was made unnecessary by my FreeNAS box. I'll use as some storage as well.

CPU, RAM and Motherboard

I spent 95% of my research time agonizing over which direction to go-AMD vs Intel, which motherboard chipset and how much RAM. Well, the RAM part was easy, seeing as how I remember spending $400 of my hard-earned busboy money on a whopping 4MB of RAM into my first hand-me-down computer ages ago. I went ahead and decided to max out the RAM by buying 32GB of Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000) for $179.99

After pouring over pages of benchmarks and reviews of the latest AMD and Intel CPUs, I decided that I wanted 8 cores and that it seemed like AMD is giving the best bang-for-buck. In this case, I decided to go and pick up the AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition for $189.99.

I spent literally hours trying to decide between the AMD chipsets that support the AM3+ CPU. The 970, 990X and 990FX all seemed to be pretty equivalent for what I wanted to do. There's very little chance that I'll be doing SLI anytime in the near future, so most of the additional benefits of the 990X and 990FX are lost on me. However, in reading reviews on the various 970 boards, it seemed like support of the FX-8350 CPU was spotty; if you had an older revision of the board it required flashing the BIOS to get it to boot. Rather than risk buying something that was going to require me to jump through hoops, I looked at the 990X boards and found them to be marginally less expensive than the 990FX boards. For $137.99 I picked up a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3, which definitely had all of the DIMM slots, 6.0Gb/s SATA ports and PCI Express x16 slots that I needed.

Budget remaining: $492.03

Videocard

My primary goal on buying a video card was to make sure to double the number of CUDA Cores currently available on my current Geforce GTX 460. In looking at the prices, that seemed to be the sweet-spot in my bang-for-buck calculations. I ended up deciding that the Geforce GTX 650 Ti seemed to be the right family of cards to be shopping in. Because my current card had 1 GB of video RAM, I decided to double that up as well by looking at video cards with 2GB of video RAM. For $169.99 I chose the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB.

Budget remaining: $322.04

Storage

Storage is one of the areas in which I decided to splurge. I knew that I wanted an SSD, but I was leaning towards a smaller SSD to use for caching. But because prices have fallen down below $1 per gigabyte I decided to use an SSD as my primary storage device. Currently, I fluctuate around 200Gb of usage for everything installed on my PC and there's lots of fat to be trimmed out of there. Because of that, I felt that I could very easily buy a Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive to use as my primary storage. The SSD set me back $209.99

Budget Remaining: $112.05

Case

Because I was bringing over the power supply from my prior computer, I only needed a shell of a case. The budget was starting to feel a little bit tight, so I employed a friend and Google to search for the best "budget" case with a slew of internal hard drive bays and that would fit my motherboard. For $39.99 I found a NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black) which seemed to fit the bill.

Budget Remaining: $72.06

Odds and Ends

The CPU I bought didn't include a cooler, so I picked up a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus for $24.71. Because I picked Amazon, I thought it made sense to go ahead and include sales tax to my bottom line which came in at $76.54

Budget Remaining: $-29.19

The Fine Print

I didn't quite make my $1000 budget. There's certainly a bit of fat that I could trim from the computer; a less expensive motherboard, slower RAM, and a smaller SSD all jump out at me as items that could've been less expensive, saving me quite a few dollars. However, I had another goal of tripling my existing system performance, and ultimately that wound up being more important to me than a small overage on the budget. Besides, there's got to be at least a hundred dollars of "old" parts which are coming over from the upgraded computer. If I really wanted it to look like I stayed inside my budget, I'd find a way to give myself credit for those pieces.

Complete Parts List

AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000)
EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB
Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black)
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
Antec 500W Power Supply (from previous computer)
Seagate Barracuda 500GB Hard Drive (from previous computer)
Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive (random unused hard drive hanging around)

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Brian's Blog

The Z06 goes Under the Wrench

The Plan

The Results

Pass 2

Pass 3

Conclusion

April Test-and-Tune @ North Star Dragway

Pass One

Pass Two

Pass Three

Pass Four

Timeslips

Final Thoughts

Wireless Charging for the Galaxy S3

Garage Makeover: Bringing Down the Popcorn Ceiling

My life as a "Brain"

Garage Makeover

How I Fought Back Against the Unrelenting Telemarketer

Adding Share Buttons to MovableType 5

Twitter

Google+

Facebook

StumbleUpon

DIY NAS: 2013 Edition

Motherboard & CPU

RAM

Case

Storage

FreeNAS Drive

NAS Drives

Conclusion

BrianMoses.net is now a Teenager!

July 2001

November 2002

April 2006

December 2010

Share your WiFi Access Point via InstaWifi

My Network Cupboard: Adding a networked Printer

The Pre-existing Condition

Choosing a New Printer

Color or Black and White

Built-in Network Connectivity vs. Print Server

Decision

Setup

Regrets

Conclusion

Computer Upgrade 2012: The Results

Minor Problems

Major Problems

The Butt Dyno

Benchmarks

Processor / GPU / System

Disk

What I Could Have Done Differently

Conclusion

Computer Upgrade 2012: The Display

Dual Head vs. Single Head

Decision

Computer Upgrade 2012: The PC Components

Newegg vs. Amazon

Meeting the "Upgrade" Requirement

CPU, RAM and Motherboard

Videocard

Storage

Case

Odds and Ends

The Fine Print

Complete Parts List